Certain fundamentals of the geopolitical frame of inter-state relations in East Asia remain as set around 70-years ago in the wake of the cataclysmic Second World War and subsequent San Francisco Treaty (1951), when the US was undisputed master of the world, China divided and excluded, Korea divided and at war, and Japan occupied. The economic underpinnings of that system, however, are now rudely shaken. The United States, in 1950, with about half of global GDP, is now 16 per cent (in “purchasing power parity” or PPP terms) while China, already (2016) 18 per cent, has grown by an astounding fifteen times in the two decades from 1995. Chinese GDP, one-quarter that of Japan's in 1991, trebled (or even quadrupled) it in 2018. Late in 2020 the IMF declared that China had become the world's biggest economy, $24.2 trillion to the US's $20.8 trillion, with the gap widening. The alliance system as a design to preserve US hegemony looks increasingly incongruous in a period of mounting US-China conflict.

Indigenous people are often depicted as helpless victims of the forces of eighteenth and nineteenth century colonial empire building: forces that were beyond their understanding or control. Focusing on the story of a mid-nineteenth century diplomatic mission by Sakhalin Ainu (Enchiw), this essay (the first of a two-part series), challenges that view, suggesting instead that, despite the enormous power imbalances that they faced, indigenous groups sometimes intervened energetically and strategically in the historical process going on around them, had some impact on the outcome of these processes. In Part 1, we look at the story of one Sakhalin Ainu family over multiple generations in order to highlight the strategic place of the Sakhalin Ainu in cross-border relationships – particularly in the relationship between China and Japan – from the early eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century.

The Coronavirus hit Japan during our study-abroad semester in Kyoto. Here we present similarities in Japanese societal response to chemical pollutants throughout the long twentieth century and to COVID-19, as they became apparent to us through a chemistry course on Japanese industrial pollution.